Apocalyspe cancelled!

Rating: 7/10 (18 July 2013)

Pacific Rim was a film that fanboys drooling from the mouth: it is a film about robots fighting monsters made as a homage to Japanese monster films and anime and was directed by Guillermo del Toro. But it was film that failed to connect with audiences and the early box-office numbers are underwhelming.
In the future a dimensional portal in the depths of the Pacific Ocean releases giant monsters known as Kaijus into our universe and attack cities across the Pacific Rim. With humanity fighting an impossible battle they create the Jaeger program, uniting to create giant mind control robots to battle the monsters. But by 2025 the only four Jaeger robots are left with few pilots, Kaiju attacks becoming more regular and politicians cutting their funding in flavour of sea wall. In desperation the Jaeger commander, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) recruits a battle scarred ex-pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) to pilot his old ship as they prepare for an attack on the portal and protect Hong Kong.
Pacific Rim is not a particular deep film, it is a B-Movie idea given a Hollywood blockbuster and a top director. If you want to you can find parallels to World War II, with the Jaeger pilots being like RAF pilots during the Battle of Britain with their numbers and equipment diminishing and the false security the sea wall offered like the Maginot Line offered to the French. Pacific Rim's plot is very basic and there are plenty of clichés in the plotting and characters but the characters are well defined and you could easily tell them apart: there did not blend together like they do in say a Michael Bay film.
The best aspect of Pacific Rim is the action and special effects. We get a good look of how the Jaegers function and battle a Kaiju in the middle of the ocean before a long build up to the Battle of Hong Kong. The pacing in the middle of the film is slower in the middle of the film but it gives us time to know the characters and del Toro does a great job setting up the world, from the military aspects to small grimaces of society in this world. The Battle is an epic event with a great CGI and destruction that could rival anything in Michael Bay's and Roland Emmerich's films. The action is clear, well shot and edited and it was very clear what was happening on screen. The big fights, the Jaegers and the Kaijus were flesh and inventive, the Jaegers were all very distinctive and the Kaijus were similar to the monster in Cloverfield.
An aspect that felt the most of del Toro's input was subplot involving Ron Perlman as a black market dealer of Kaiju body parts. Perlman was delightfully menacing in his brash dress sense and use of a beautiful knife. Perlman gave the character a brass charisma like he did with Hellboy and the iconography used in the slums had that del Toro, including the use of Kaiju skeleton as a temple. The whole black market scenes were very similar to the scenes in Hellboy II: The Golden Army. The idea of some people seeing the Kaijus as Gods and people eating Kaiju body parts was similar to the Nigerian crime lords eating the Prawns' hearts in District 9.
Perlman was one of the highlights from the cast. The other highlight in the cast was Elba, a popular and talented actor who oozed coolness and conviction in what he did. When Idris Elba tells you the apocalypse is cancelled, the apocalypse is cancelled! Rinko Kikuchi too was strong in her English language debut, but Hunnam was a little on the stiff side. We were also given two scientists who were comic relief, but sided more on the annoying side, particularly Burn Gorman who seemed to be trying to do his best impression of Matt Smith's Doctor Who.
Pacific Rim does make a theme about Raleigh and Mako (Kikuchi) both having pain and lose in in their lives and there are also parallels between Raleigh and Stacker; but the film's themes about shared memories, the Inception/Trance look of the dreamscape or the relationship between man and machine. There are also some problems involving stereotypes: the eccentric British scientist is one of them, the other is the stoic, strong silent Russians who only defined by their nationalities. There is also a plot hole about the scientists looking into the mind of a baby Kaiju, but it leads to the question how does it know anything? Plus the ending is essentially Independence Day's.
As well as the top notch special effects that are detailed and show the massive scale of the Jaeger, the score by Ramin Djawadi is excellent, from its Inception style horns, a deep Russian chorus and generally offered grand pieces of music.
In comparison to say Michael Bay's Transformers films, del Toro knew what the audience wants, giant action sequences that are clear and inventive as it homages what it is influenced by. There is a build-up of the characters, comic-relief is kept to a minimum. But this was a film that needed at least one skirmish during the character development and should have explored the themes a bit more. But it is still refreshing to see a studio taking a risk with a big budget blockbuster and letting a respected filmmaker take on the project.